Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity into a Powerful Business Advantage.

Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity into a Powerful Business Advantage. By Pat Fallon and Fred Senn. Harvard Business School Press, 225 pages. $26.95.

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Okay, maybe the finance suite isn't the best place to look for creative thinking about "the brand" or big marketing ideas. But a central tenet in "Juicing the Orange" is that executives have more creativity in their organizations than they realize, yet often inadvertently stifle it or channel it inappropriately.

Authors Pat Fallon and Fred Senn, co-founders of the hugely successful advertising boutique now known as Fallon Worldwide, trace their own experiences with a slew of blue-chip customers like Citibank, United Airlines, BMW and Holiday Inn Express. Along the way, they offer some key lessons that deal with: associating a "proprietary emotion" with your brand (presumably, a positive one); "outpacing the commoditization" of your products; spurring customers to seek out your brand; reinvigorating and repositioning mature or damaged brands; and selecting the best media for your message.

The book is lively and conversational, but is also more than a bit self-congratulatory. Still, it makes for stimulating reading and offers some arresting thoughts about how mature or even worn-out brands can be reinvigorated by unconventional thinking and clever advertising.